Danbury-area vote bucks statewide trend

Updated 5:47 pm, Wednesday, November 9, 2016

The Republican wave that swept Donald J. Trump into the presidency appeared to diminish Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in blue-leaning Connecticut, but in the Danbury area, the Democratic nominee managed to outperform Barack Obama’s 2012 numbers.

According to unofficial results, Clinton defeated Trump statewide by 54 percent to 42 percent, a decisive victory, but smaller than the margin four years ago when Obama trounced Republican Mitt Romney, 58 percent to 40 percent.

But in 14 towns and cities in greater Danbury, Clinton polled about 1,800 votes better than Obama, while Trump underperformed Romney’s 2012 total by about 1,400 votes, according to the Associated Press.

J.R. Romano, the state’s Republican chairman, chalked up Trump’s lower poll numbers in this part of the state to the candidate’s inflammatory rhetoric during the campaign. But he said the party’s success across the state, including gains in the state House and Senate, were a clear rebuke of Democratic policies.

“I think that you have some people in the area that are uncomfortable with Trump’s tone,” Romano said. “But I think what we’re seeing is here in Connecticut we’re tired of partisan politics. The Democrats don’t want to take ownership of their failures, and Trump tapped into those failures.”

Brookfield figures have been omitted from the regional comparison because technical problems in one of the town’s two precincts delayed this year’s returns.

Three area towns, Redding, Ridgefield and Newtown, flipped from supporting Romney in 2012 to voting for Clinton on Tuesday, while New Milford turned the other way, going for Obama in the last cycle and voting for Trump by more than 1,000 votes this time around.

The swings in Newtown and Redding were sizable, with Democrats gaining 932 and 1,323 votes respectively, but the shift in Ridgefield was by far the largest, with Clinton winning by more than 2,200 votes after Romney took the town by 900 in 2012.

Clinton’s victory in Ridgefield did not surprise its Democratic chairman, Tom Madden, but the margin did.

First Selectman Rudy Marconi, a Democrat, believes that the town’s voters and many in the Danbury area did not feel the same itch for wholesale change that helped catapult Trump to a decisive electoral victory.

“I think that people in Ridgefield are a little more moderate than the rest of the country,” Marconi said. “If you look at Ridgefield as relatively affluent, times are not that bad, the market has come back and many people’s unemployment has come down. You see a lot of improvements everywhere. The rest of the country has not seen what we’ve experienced.”

“That the Republicans in Ridgefield tend to be more of the establishment, traditional Republicans, and it appears that they are somewhat reluctant to embrace now president-elect Donald Trump,” Heiser said.

But he added that despite the results in Western Connecticut, the GOP is gaining strength across the state.

“Connecticut as a whole is somewhat the blueberry in the tomato sauce of our country,” Heiser said. “It continues to be a stronghold for liberal political views, but there’s a robust Republican Party statewide in Connecticut.”